Built To Spill’s founder and frontman Doug Martsch is, among many things, a collaborator. And that collaborative nature shines brightly on Built To Spill’s latest album, When The Wind Forgets Your Name, just released on Sept. 9, 2022. The songs were recorded with the musicians Martsch worked with while spending time touring and playing music in Brazil. Now, Martch has teamed up with Melanie Radford and Teresa Esguerra to create the touring version of Built To Spill. While on that tour, Built To Spill visited The Current studio to play songs and to chat with host Mac Wilson.

During the conversation with Mac, we hear more about Radford and Esguerra, and how they came to play with Martsch. We also hear a bit more about Martsch’s time in Brazil — and we enjoy some speculation on just how long the longest Built To Spill song has run in minutes.

Watch and listen to the full session above, and read a transcript below.

Interview Transcript

Edited for time and clarity 

Mac Wilson: Hello friends, I'm Mac Wilson from The Current from Minnesota Public Radio and I am joined in our studio by Built To Spill. Welcome to St. Paul, Built To Spill. We've got Mel, Theresa and Doug, Doug Martsch, longtime member of Built To Spill, the consistent member over the years. And let's start things first with talking with the other two members of the band because you're new this time around, and you each have respective projects that you've been playing in addition to playing with Built To Spill. So let's start with Mel. Mel, which band do you play with?

Melanie Radford: I'm in a band called Blood Lemon, and from Boise, Idaho, as well.

Mac Wilson: So do you have dates yet coming on the tour? Or have you played so far?

Melanie Radford: We haven't played any so far. Well, we did a little bit in our last tour for the spring. But for this tour, we're going to join at the end of this month and then we'll play a little bit in the beginning of September. We have like 10 dates, I think that we're doing on like the East Coast. Yeah, that's pretty much it though. We did some touring a month ago with a band called Vision Video; that was really fun. But yeah, that's about it.

Mac Wilson: And Teresa, which is your band?

Teresa Esguerra: I play with a band called Prism Bitch out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. And we are currently doing a nine-show run as direct opener with Built to Spill. Yeah.

Mac Wilson: Does it get to be a long evening for you playing both the support act and as the headliner in one night? Or do you even think of it that way?

Teresa Esguerra: Um, it does; mostly a time management thing. And since I'm playing drums, there's, you know, making sure I get to bed on time, get some rest, but this is our third go-around of doing it. And for both Mel and I, doing double duty, it just the endurance kind of builds as you go along. So as long as you sleep, and eat right, I think are the two things.

Mac Wilson: Now, Doug, you've played with many, many folks over the years. How in this case, did Teresa and Mel come into the fold for this incarnation of Built To Spill?

Doug Martsch: Well, when I was looking for some new people to play with in Boise, Mel was the first person that I reached out to. I'd seen her play in her previous band, Marshall Poole, a couple years before, and I thought she was amazing. And so I reached out to her and then we had a drummer that lived in Boise and we played a couple shows and then I ended up going to Brazil and meeting these Brazilian guys who I ended up touring with for about a year. And then when that came to a conclusion at the end of 2019, we'd just done some Prism Bitch shows and I had really, you know, fallen in love with Teresa's drumming. And so I asked her to join the crew. And yeah, so we we had a couple of rehearsals we had we had a tour booked for 2020. We had a few rehearsals, and right before we were about to hit the road, everything got shut down. And then about the time that everyone got vaccinated, we started playing together again, and we played our first show in July of last year, and we've been playing pretty regularly since then. We've been hitting it pretty hard for, yeah, for this last year.

Mac Wilson: Tell me a little bit about your time in Brazil, Doug. In my personal experience, I have no experience with Brazil. But in playing various artists on the air on The Current, I found that Portuguese names are like the trickiest to say; I feel like I never get exactly the right pronunciation. So tell us a little bit more about your time in Brazil, and how is your Portuguese now?

Doug Martsch: Brazil was amazing. I've, you know, I've traveled a little bit in the band. We haven't done a lot of overseas stuff. We've been to Europe a few times and Australia, but we've never been to South of the Border. I've never been to Asia or anything like that. But the trip to Brazil was really great, because usually we're on tour and we're just the group, you know, and maybe a tour manager from somewhere and you know, you meet people every day. But this time we had kind of a crew. I met this woman Isa Giorgetti, who she was kind of trying to get us booked over there for about a year. And we've been talking to each other. And she's the one who introduced me to Lê Almeida and Oruã, the, the people that I ended up playing with. And so she kind of took us under her wing and showed us around and we got to spend a little extra time there because we had to rehearse and stuff. So our sound guy Lawrence and I went over there and had a great time. Both of us just loved it. for lots of reasons, but I think that was the main thing, just that we found these people that were like, kind of kindred spirits in the music scene that you know, became the band and good friends, friends for life. And there's a lot of great things about Brazil, a lot of great music, beautiful; you know, good food and just a really sweet culture. 

Mac Wilson: I've got good news. Well, there's the Brazilian chain restaurant that's right by First Avenue tonight. So if you're looking for somewhere to go, Fogo de Chão is right next door. I don't know if you can necessarily squeeze that in, the buffet trip before playing at First Avenue, but FYI, there is Fogo de Chão across the street.

Melanie Radford: That's good to know.

Mac Wilson: So that song that you played to open up the set, "Fool's Gold," that's the one that you open up with. That's from the new record, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. And it's a record, from what I understand, was largely recorded during the pandemic; it was the mixing, then, which you had to work on remotely during the pandemic. Do you feel like you... I'm figuring out the right way of putting this: Do you feel like having that much time made you spend more time tinkering around with it? 

Doug Martsch: Actually, not really. So yeah, this record was made with the Brazilian guys; not with with these two. And we'd finished touring in 2019 and just spent a couple of weeks recording it ourselves in our practice space on a computer. And it was the plan from the get-go to just do it ourselves and not go to a studio. So that worked out kind of nice with the whole pandemic. But I worked on it by myself a bunch, but I really, I didn't feel super inspired during that time. I was kind of, you know, I don't know, I felt a little bit, I don't know, I wasn't in a very creative place. But the songs, I'd been working on for a lot of them for years, and they were pretty well figured out. So it didn't really need a lot of inspiration to finish it up, you know? Most of it was just kind of just, you know, putting in some time and getting everything done. So no, I didn't I didn't work it hard. I also wanted to keep it pretty simple. I didn't want it to be, you know, I didn't want it to be too complex of a record. I kind of wanted it to be sort of simple sounding.

Mac Wilson: The new record is on the way, called "When the Wind Forgets Your Name." That's an evocative title. I need to start thinking about the metaphors behind that one. Was that a slogan or a proverb that cycled around your brain?

Doug Martsch: I don't remember how it started or where it came from. It's a lyric in one of the songs, and so I picked it out from that, but I can't remember what I was thinking. You know what, it's a song called "Elements," and each verse kind of talks about a different element. And so the wind one is that one, it's kind of, you know, it's a little bit of maybe like a play on the Jimi Hendrix song, "The Wind Cries Mary"; you know, the wind knowing someone's name and not knowing someone's name.

Mac Wilson: The first song that you put out from the new record is "Gonna Lose," and I've enjoyed that one quite a bit. I like the video, too. It's hard to for me to articulate exactly what it is. But it's like exactly what I would expect a Built To Spill video to look and sound like. So the animation does a really good job of matching that feel. Who did you get to animate the video?

Doug Martsch: Oh, that's sweet to hear. It's Jordan Minkoff. And he's, he's he played in a band called Slam Dunk, who we met maybe 10 years ago, a Canadian band who became my favorite band. And then he made a lot of videos for his band and for other people's bands. And he just has a great sense of humor. And he really gets our band, so I'm glad that you felt that it fit with Built to Spill because I feel that way about him, like the things he does make sense to us.

Mac Wilson: In particular, it was your song "Living Zoo." I can easily picture "Living Zoo" with a very similar video to that.

Doug Martsch: Yeah, he did that and the follow-up, the "Never Be The Same" video. And then he's done two videos for this record, and he's working on a third one. And he has a project called Wet Face. It's just him by himself on a keyboard and singing great songs. And really, he's just a really silly, amazing guy. So we're doing some shows with with him, too, when Blood Lemon joins us on tour.

Mac Wilson: So when we first started playing, "Gonna Lose" — this is, like, from a radio DJ perspective, we played, it's like a two-and-a-half-minute song, and I look at the tracklisting, and I'm like, "Well, this has got to be like 'Conventional Wisdom,' where we play an edit of it, and then the studio version is longer, like, probably nine minutes or so." But no! It's like two-and-a-half minutes on the album too. So Doug, I'm curious: In your brain, how do you know which songs are going to be the ones, "Okay, this is the one that's going to go into a really lengthy instrumental coda," and which ones are gonna be really concise and poppy, dare I say? How do you even get your brain going, like, which are going to be the ones with the big solo?

Doug Martsch: Hmmm... I'm not sure, I'm not sure. I think for the most part, I feel like I want to keep them all short, and I try to edit them to get everything I want across as short as possible. And sometimes I feel like it takes a while to get everything I want to get across. You know. But I don't know; you know, there's no real...  Sometimes it's like a reaction, you know, if I've, when we make a record with kind of short songs, and the next one, I want to make them sprawl a little bit, and then that get burnout on that, and you go back the other way. So like, there's a little bit of a pattern like that with just reacting to the thing you've already done and you're either tired of it or if you know, for whatever reason, maybe the music that I'm listening to at the time is more concise, so I want to emulate that.

Mac Wilson: I think you'll appreciate this that occasionally I host the request show here on The Current, and probably one of the most reliable requests is Built To Spill's cover of "Cortez the Killer," which people want to hear that on the air. I think it's been done once or twice that we've actually played it, but it routinely exceeds 20 minutes in length. I'm curious in the history of Built To Spill, in terms of minutes, what do you think is the longest any one song has gone on? What's the longest you've gone?

Melanie Radford: Minutes. Hours.

Doug Martsch: Minutes? I think like, I don't know, 700, I think minutes.

Mac Wilson: Okay.

Doug Martsch: Probably the longest one we've done.

Mac Wilson: That's fair enough. We are in The Current studio with Built To Spill and want to give a big thanks to... [laughs] sorry, I'll start that over again. It's ok — 700 minutes, I'm putting that together in my brain. But honestly, I believe you.

Doug Martsch: I've never done anything for 700 minutes in a row.

Mac Wilson: I probably sleep for 700 minutes in a row at this point. But yeah.

Melanie Radford: Maybe!

Mac Wilson: Well, Built To Spill in The Current studio: Doug, Teresa, Melanie, thank you for taking the time to stop by today. I want to give a thanks as well to our producer, Rachel Frances; to our engineers, Eric Romani and Evan Clark, for photographing as well. And [Built To Spill] have a song at the end of the set, "Conventional Wisdom," that I was thinking about earlier, and I'm really thrilled to hear you play it. So thank you for stopping in again. 

Doug Martsch: Thanks, Mac.

Melanie Radford: Thank you.

Teresa Esguerra: Thank you, Mac.

Video Segments

00:00:00 Fool's Gold
00:03:50 Conventional Wisdom
00:12:09 Interview with host Mac Wilson

Band Members

Teresa Esguerra
Doug Martsch
Melanie Radford 

Credits

Host – Mac Wilson
Guests – Built To Spill
Producer – Rachel Frances
Video – Eric Xu Romani
Camera Operators – Thor Cramer Bornemann
Audio – Evan Clark
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Built To Spill - official site